A typical or conventional vehicle includes one or more mirrors which cooperatively provide and/or allow certain visual images of the environment or ambient environment to be acquired and displayed. While these mirrors do provide some desired images, the arrangement has some drawbacks.
For example and without limitation, the mirrors of a vehicle do not provide a view of the entire environment surrounding the vehicle and therefore substantially prevents the driver and/or vehicle occupants from acquiring an uninterrupted view of the entire area surrounding the vehicle, which is referred to as the environment or the ambient environment. For example, the provided mirror assembly does not typically allow the driver or the vehicle occupants to view areas and/or regions and/or objects residing within and/or along the left and/or the right frontal portions of the vehicle, especially if the vehicle is travelling behind a relatively large truck or other type of relatively large vehicle, such as a sports utility vehicle. Furthermore, to gain additional environmental image information, drivers are required to undesirably turn or contort their heads, thereby being distracted from the task of driving the vehicle and being forced to “take their eyes off the road”. Therefore, it may be desirable to increase the amount of provided environmental image information over that which is provided by the vehicle mirror assemblies and to allow a driver and/or occupants within a vehicle to selectively view the acquired visual or image information representing and/or associated with the environment in which the vehicle resides.
Consequently, there is a need to selectively acquire and display information which represents and/or is associated with the environment in which a vehicle resides, including but not limited to the areas and/or regions which cooperatively surround the vehicle, in a manner which overcomes at least some of the drawbacks associated with prior image acquisition techniques and assemblies.